Updated 17-Sep-2025
UW CIHR External Review (UCER) Program
The Office of Research will arrange and cover the cost of up to three external reviews of any University of Waterloo-led CIHR Project Grant applications who meet all program deadlines outlined below.
This is an excellent opportunity to receive important feedback from experts in your field to ensure the competitiveness of the application. We strongly encourage Project Grant applicants to take advantage of this resource.
Eligibility
To be eligible, the Nominated Principal Applicant must
- be tenured or tenure-track, full-time Waterloo faculty, or hold a definite term research professor appointment, where the primary affiliation is with University of Waterloo.
- be an Independent Researcher as defined by CIHR.
- be willing to commit to (re)submitting to CIHR within 2 years of participating in the UCER program.
- meet all program deadlines. Failure to meet any of the program deadlines will result in the application being removed from this round of external review.
- Participants in the new Acceleration program are not eligible for the UCER program.
Process
- ~2.5 months before CIHR application deadline - NPA emails the tentative title of their application and the name, email, and phone number of between 3-5 suggested reviewers (do NOT suggest any that will be included in the application).
- ~2 months before CIHR application deadline - NPA submits application package for external review.
- This should be a fulsome application package with as many of the final components as possible (e.g. summary, lay summary, summary of progress, proposal, CV)
- ~1 month before CIHR application deadline - External reviewer deadline to provide their feedback.
Anticipated Program Deadlines
For NPAs submitting to the Spring 2026 CIHR Project Grant competition
- December 8, 2025 - NPA emails the name, email, and phone number of between 3-5 suggested reviewers (do NOT suggest any that will be included in the application), and the anticipated title of the proposal.
- January 5, 2026 - NPA submits the application package for external review.
- January 26, 2026 - External reviewer deadline to provide their feedback.
- February 26, 2026 by 9am - NPA submits full application by internal deadline